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GUADEC 2015

Dear GNOME community. I just had my second GUADEC together with all of you. It was awesome! Big thanks to all of you, especially those who made this happen as well as the sponsors and the GNOME Foundation for choosing me as a sponsored participant.

Just as last year, I got a bit sick in the end, nothing really harmful or unexpected.

Lightning Talks & coala

Because coala has two GSoC interns who both attended GUADEC, we had two lightning talks about current developments of coala. I couldn’t help but add another lightning talk later to clear up our vision and identity because describing the essence of what coala is, is somewhat hard to do and couldn’t be fully covered by the previous talks. You can watch the regular lightning talks at http://videos.guadec.org/2015/Lighting%20Talks%20&%20Closing/Lighting%20Talks%20&%20Closing.ogv.

GNOME and ownCloud

I was happy to see how engaged the people from ownCloud are promoting the idea of synchronizing all kinds of data from the GNOME platform to ownCloud in addition to “stupid files”. You can read a bit more about those things at https://csorianognome.wordpress.com/2015/08/11/guadec-2015-topic-15-owncloud-and-gnome-should-we-make-it-our-ubuntuoneonedriveicloudgoogle-services/. As one possible way to achieve this I had the pleasure to start discussions about Jan-Christoph Borchardt joint GSoC projects with double mentoring from GNOME and ownCloud in the future. I imagine this to be great for the students, being able to learn about two communities in one summer. A few project ideas are already written down at our 2016 ideas page. I am trying to organize that I can attend the ownCloud Conference in Berlin for at least a day so we can work a bit more on those and other ideas.

BoFs

I had the pleasure to be able to hold a more or less two-day coala BoF with almost all core contributors of our small community around (all of them kindly sponsored by the GNOME Foundation). It was awesome to see you all in person! We were able to further develop our ideas, get new contacts and even possible contributors, decide that we want a coala T-Shirt, fix a lot of bugs, develop our roadmap further and much much more.

Besides all that communications about improving GNOME’s translation infrastructure by using coala to automatically detect issues in uploaded translations happened. Although this is only an idea, we can imagine it to be easy as well as feasible to let coala automatically append review comments and even fixed versions within damned lies to make translation review easier and more automated while keeping everyone learning and giving the reviewers the ultimate control over what corrections to accept.

We also had a BoF about automating GSoC – in short, we’re working on a system to automate all those stupid manual tasks in the future. It will not be specific to GNOME and hopefully reduces GNOME GSoC administration to pushing very few buttons instead of writing and sending emails, compiling project records and other stuff manually.